


Paper Skin and Glass Bones

by hushlittlewolf



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Future Fic, M/M, Mentions of Canonical Character Death, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-19
Updated: 2013-08-19
Packaged: 2017-12-24 00:07:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/932698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hushlittlewolf/pseuds/hushlittlewolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek can’t take this. He can’t take this joking, concerned boy that has the evidence of Derek’s shortcomings carved into his skin. </p><p>Or</p><p>The one where Derek never paid attention to how much Stiles got hurt...until he sees Stiles shirtless and notices all the scars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paper Skin and Glass Bones

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! Just another prompt I filled on tumblr :) Hope you enjoy!

“Personally, I could have probably done without that last dip in the lake.”

Stiles pulls at the front of his wet t-shirt with a frown, the fabric heavy and clinging to his chilled skin. Derek rolls his eyes.

“ _That’s_ what you’re complaining about?” he growls. There’s a sharp pain in his back, and Derek cranes his head around to see a deep gash between his shoulder blades slowly re-knitting itself. Too slowly. Goddamn hunters.

“Hey, not all of us are supernatural furnaces! It’s _November._ I think my balls have crawled back up inside me.” Shivering, Stiles tries to wring the hem of his shirt out. Brackish lake water squelches unto the forest floor, dead leaves gleaming wetly in the light of the wan moon.

Derek’s jeans feel weighted by the same water, his boots filled to the brim. He shakes his head, droplets cascading from the ends of his hair, and Stiles yelps in protest. “Dude!” he exclaims. Derek sees the train of thought behind the irritation in his amber orbs, and he holds up a finger.

“You make _one_ dog joke, and I swear to God Stiles—”

“You’ll rip my throat out with your teeth. Yeah, yeah I’ve heard this song and dance before sour wolf,” Stiles mutters dismissively, hand waving the threat away like it’s nothing. He sighs and gives up on drying off. There’s an exhausted stoop to his shoulders, and Derek notices he’s favoring his right side slightly. Something like worry, tinged with the beginnings of a diluted panic filters through his veins. He wants to ask about it, is about to, when Stiles shoves away from the tree he’s leaning against and jerks his chin back to the lake they’ve just crawled out of.

“Think we lost them?” he asks. Derek’s eyes slide back to the water, placid, silver, _cold._ He tracks the distant shoreline but sees no movement. He hears nothing more than the wind and the woods. Their pursuers are nowhere to be found.

And it worries him. So many things worry him.

“Don’t know,” he finally admits at length. Stiles raises an eyebrow at him—always fucking challenging—and he bares his teeth. “I _don’t know_ alright? They aren’t anywhere close but that doesn’t mean they still aren’t tracking us. We’ll just have to keep moving.”

Stiles sighs again, breath misting out before him, and runs a hand through his wet hair. “Home sweet home huh?” he mutters to himself, bitter and tired and just the slightest bit hysterical. “It isn’t Beacon Hills if something supernatural isn’t going bump in the night and trying to kill us.”

“Hunters are human.”

“Yeah well the murderous Omega that they are chasing—that they’ve mistake as part of _our_ pack which is just awesome—sure as fuck isn’t,” Stiles snaps back, and Derek blinks at the words _our,_ nearly missing Stiles’ next words. “Isn’t our territory marked or something? Isn’t there some werewolf equivalent to a _Do Not Enter_ sign? Did you miss a tree when you peed a circle around Beacon?”

Derek scowls, confusion and that tightness in his chest fading away beneath familiar irritation. “Stiles,” he growls.

“Technically, that was a wolf joke. You said no _dog_ jokes.”

If hunters and rogue omegas didn’t get him first, this kid was going to be the death of him, Derek swore. Except…well Stiles wasn’t exactly a kid anymore. It had been a few years since they met, since Scott was turned and Beacon Hills became a hub of, as Stiles put it, things that go “bump in the night.” Those brats that Derek had first met were now in college, out of his hair most of the time but not necessarily out of his life. Isaac and Cora still lived with him during vacations, and Scott and Stiles were a couple of leeches Derek had yet figured out how to detach. When they were all at the newly restored Hale house—eating Derek’s food, making a mess of his living room—Peter liked to coo over how Derek was such a good pack mom, taking care of her pups when they came back to the den. On more than one occasion, Derek has contemplated slashing his uncle’s throat out again. He thinks he could make it stick this time. Maybe.

“Not that your constipated, thoughtful face isn’t cute, but do you think we could get out of here sometime _before_ I become hypothermic?”

Maybe Peter would even enjoy some company in his grave this time around.

Taking a deep breath and counting to ten—very, _very_ slowly—Derek turns his back on Stiles and stalks off into the woods, only smirking a little when there’s a muffled curse behind him and the sound of stumbling footsteps.

~*~*~*~*~

It’s nearing dawn when they get the call.

“Wait, wait. Say that again!” Stiles squints and presses the phone harder against his ear, trying to make out Scott’s voice through static and a broken speaker.

“…hunters…caught the omega. Allison’s dad…convinced…not our…pack.”

“ _Chris_ is convinced it wasn’t part of our pack? I thought he already knew that! Allison really needs to work on her communication skills.”

There’s a garbled patch of static, a high-pitched whine, and then Scott’s voice comes back weaker than ever. “…convinced _hunters._ Chris…convinced…the hunters. We’re…in…clear.”

“In the clear,” Stiles repeats and sags against the tree he’s leaning against. He lets his head fall back in relief, bark catching in the fine strands of his hair. “Awesome. That’s…the best news I’ve heard all night.”

It sounds like Scott laughs on the other end, then there’s more static and,  “…okay?”

Stiles takes the liberty of interpreting the missing parts of Scott’s sentence. “Yeah we’re fine dude,” he sighs, wincing when a barely scabbed over scratch on his side pulls. “Little banged up—or at least I am—but nothing bad. Derek and I are already at his car. We’ll meet you guys at the house?”

He gets white noise as a response before his phone crackles and goes completely dead. Stiles pulls it away from his ear and glances down at the black, waterlogged screen. “Alright, thanks for the heads up. Talk to you soon, bye,” he mutters, before shoving his useless phone into the pocket of his jeans. He lifts his eyes to find Derek staring at him, half perched on the hood of his still completely ostentatious Camaro. 

“You hear all that?” he questions, though he already knows the answer. Derek doesn’t even respond, just arches an eyebrow. Stiles rolls his eyes. “Don’t give me that look. And you totally owe me a new phone by the way.” He stalks over to the car and plops down next to the alpha werewolf, rolling his neck from side to side and groaning when it cracks.

“I do?” Derek deadpans. He looks over to find Stiles staring at him, way too close for there to really be any shred of survival instinct in him, but there’s that damn stubborn glint to his eye again.

“Uh yeah, you do. If I remember correctly, you’re the one that pulled me into the lake. You’re the reason my phone’s doing a horrible impression of a sponge. So _you’re_ going to buy me a new phone.”

“If I remember correctly, I pulled you into the lake because hunters were _shooting at us.”_

“Semantics. Doesn’t change the facts. Also, it’s Thanksgiving dude. I came home for turkey and stuffing and tryptophan poisoning. **Not** to be chased through the woods by a crazed, rogue omega and equally crazed, rouge hunters. You _owe me._

Derek closes his eyes, rubs at the bridge of his nose, and asks for patience. “Fine,” he growls, but it lacks the heat it would have 3 years ago. It lacks any heat at all, really. “I’ll by you a goddamn phone if you’ll just shut up.”

Stiles grins like the cat that got the canary and slides off the hood. “I knew you’d see it my way,” he crows, and Derek wonders why he puts up with these irritating, soon-not-to-be teenagers.

A quiet sound interrupts his contemplation of how this had become his life. Derek looks up to see Stiles shivering, teeth chattering as a wind blows through the small clearing they’re in, dry leaves floating through the air. His skin is pale in the bruised light of the impending dawn, teeth flashes of white behind blue tinged lips. The idiot is really going to catch hypothermia.

“Here,” Derek says when the chattering gets so bad he’s sure Stiles is going to break his teeth. He pushes off his car and moves around to dig in the back seat. He comes up with a shirt, clean and warm, and hands it to Stiles. The younger man gives him a judging look.

“Please don’t tell me you live out of your car when we’re all away. I thought we broke you of your lurker, homeless phase.”

“Stiles will you just put on the shirt before I have to drag you to the hospital for being a idiot?”

“Aww you really do care.”

Despite his cheeky comments, Stiles does set Derek’s shirt aside before stripping off his damp one. Derek is just about to turn away to start the car when something catches his eye.

“What the hell is that?”

Stiles freezes, water dripping down his wrists as he wrung out his shirt. “What?” he asks. Derek’s eyes are trained on his chest, and Stiles feels something clench in his gut. “Oh man, if there are leeches on me I swear to god…” He trails off as he braces himself, muscles going taunt beneath his skin as he looks down and…finds nothing.

“What?” he asks again. Now he’s frowning as he looks back at Derek, confusion carving out a furrow in his brow. Derek doesn’t respond, not verbally. He takes a step forward, and his hand comes up like he’s going to touch Stiles. His face twitches, stoic mask cracking to let some emotion that Stiles can’t place through. It hits him low in the chest, and Stiles starts to worry.

 “Derek, dude, you’re kind of freaking me out here. What’s wrong?”

The alpha’s now less than a foot away from him, so close he can feel the warmth of his skin, fingers hovering over his chest, over his…

“ _Oh,”_ Stiles breathes.

And suddenly it feels like his skin is on fire.

“What,” Derek starts again, and his voice is deeper, more jagged around the edges, like broken glass. “What are these?”

Stiles laughs, the sounds forced from his lungs, and leans back a few inches. “Now I know you were raised by wolves, Derek,” he teases, his tone flat and wrong. “But I also know you’re not stupid. They’re scars. It’s no big deal.”

“No big deal?” Derek sounds angry when he repeats the words and—yup, his eyes flash red when they meet Stiles’. “These look like a pretty big goddamn deal Stiles.” His fingers finally bridge those last few inches, skin meeting skin, and Stiles flushes with shame.

Okay, so yeah. It’s a big deal. But only if you make it one, and Stiles has decidedly not made it one in the past. He wears shirts that aren’t too tight, never goes swimming topless, and has—not really by choice—remained pretty innocent in the being naked with other people department. Translation: Yes, at 19, he’s still a virgin.

Could you blame him though? How the **_hell_** was he supposed to explain this to potential bed partners?

Derek’s fingers trace the worst of the ridges on his left pectoral. There are four of them, deep and raised and a faded pink color now. Starting just below the jut of his collarbone, the claw marks extend down across his sternum. Smaller scars dot his skin in random intervals: a shard of glass here, being impaled on a piece of wood there, and just general evidence of being thrown around by supernatural beings with supernatural strength. Stiles even has a small patch of badly healed road rash between his shoulder blades, remnants of being tossed across a parking lot. They’re old news though; scar tissue in place of gaping wounds. Stiles got over the fact of his physical disfigurement a long time ago since they meant he was still _alive._

“How did—” Derek starts suddenly, ripping Stiles from his musings. “When did—”

He can’t seem to get the questions out, can’t seem to find the right words and put them in the right order, so Stiles helps him out, takes liberty with interpretations once again.

“The Alpha Pack,” he offers, and then shrugs while averting his eyes. “Mostly anyway. To be honest, one or two of the smaller ones might be from our first run-ins with your bad touch uncle.”

Derek doesn’t smirk like Stiles wants. He doesn’t even scowl that scowl which Stiles knows is three parts irritated exasperation and one part amusement. He just stares, stares like he hasn’t in a long time, unnerving, intense, digging straight into Stiles’ bones. Stiles wants to cover up, but Derek’s fingers are still tracing patterns on his chest, and Stiles…Stiles doesn’t know what to do with that. He settles for clenching his hands at his sides and waits patiently for Derek’s jaw to stop chewing on his words and spit them out.

It takes a while, but eventually Derek breathes, “How did I not notice?” His eyes are glazed as his fingertips press on two, faded, parallel lines etched just below Stiles’ ribcage. He looks up, Stiles mouths _Gerard,_ and Derek swears he hears the crackle of electricity.It feels like he’s been kicked in the solar plexus, sternum snapping under the blow. He waits for it to heal, for the pain to leech away like usual, but it doesn’t. And it only gets worse when Stiles keeps talking.

“Well, to be fair, you were kind of busy. If it wasn’t Uncle Bad Touch killing the unsuspecting townsfolk, it was Jackson being his grody, murderous lizard self, or the Argents killing everything in sight, or the Alpha pack staring an all out war, or Cora almost dying and your girlfriend sacrificing people—” Stiles cuts himself off with a wince, biting his tongue hard enough that Derek smells blood. “Sorry,” he apologizes quickly. The muscles under Derek’s hand twitch. “I didn’t mean—I know it wasn’t your fault. Ms. Blake used her creepy, stolen mojo to trick you and—”

“ _Stiles,”_ Derek grits out. The boy snaps his jaw shut because, even though he hasn’t heard that tone of voice in months (Derek had been almost nice to him since the Alpha Pact fiasco ended), he knows when Derek has had enough of his rambling. He cringes away; he can’t help it. It’s all muscle memory, and even if he intellectually knows Derek hasn’t slammed him into walls or steering wheels in a few years, the body is harder to convince.

Derek doesn’t miss the flinch and suddenly, he feels sick to his stomach. Now, guilt is nothing new for Derek, not in the slightest. He carries the death of his whole family along the bowed curve of his shoulders, in each breath he draws through seared lungs— _it doesn’t matter that he wasn’t in the house that day, he burned along with the rest of them—_ he faces it every time he goes to the store and sees the faded, forgotten, weathered _Missing_ pictures in the window. He **makes** himself see Erica and Boyd’s smiling faces and remembers the quiet affairs of their funerals, remembers how their families will never know what really happened to them. Never know strong they were. How brave. _How Derek ruined them._

So, yeah, guilt is nothing new. But Derek’s learned to live with it. He carries it inside him, another beating heart, as a part of him as bone and flesh and sinew. Most days, it’s a dull throb, a familiar hell: he breathes in, breathes out, and thinks of all the people that no longer do the same because of him. This though…this feels different. Because Stiles is human. Stiles is breakable; cut him and he _bleeds and doesn’t stop._ Stiles has no business in Derek’s world.

And yet…Stiles is pack.

Derek knows he will never be the Alpha his mother was; he knows he will never even come **_close._** He also knows there is no comparing the pack of his childhood— _the Hales—_ to what he has found for himself now. Some of the older families—allies of his late family that had contacted Derek after the whole Alpha Pack shitstorm—had trouble calling his motley group a pack at all. Derek doesn’t blame them. His “pack” consists of three betas—Isaac, Cora, and his undead uncle—a banshee that was probably going to take over the world some day, another _alpha_ for fuck’s sake (and a true alpha at that), and…a human. His pack is like a Molotov cocktail waiting to explode but…it **is** _his._ They are his pack, and Derek is their alpha, and he is responsible for them. All of them. And here—right before him—is yet another example of how he’s inexplicably failed them. Failed _Stiles._ Again.

Derek wonders, not for the first time, why he doesn’t just relinquish his power to Scott, but knows, deep in his heart, it comes down to his stubborn, sickening pride.

“Hey Derek? Derek. _Sourwolf!_ ”

“ _What?”_ he snarls out, because he’s coming apart at the seams, because he’s failing and failing _again_ , because there is blood curling down Stiles’ ribcage and he can smell it and it’s there because of **him.**

Stiles blinks, eyes shadowed, skin pale, shades of gray in his space before the dawn. His breath spirals out before him in white tendrils. “I was just,” he starts. He bites his lip and takes a step forward. “You looked…are you okay?” Derek is confused until he sees a flash of red reflected in the window of his car, until he feels the prick of claws against his palms. He takes a deep breath and the wolf sinks beneath his skin.

“Let’s go,” Derek grunts abruptly, slipping around Stiles to reach for the car door. He can’t stand here any longer. He can’t breathe around his guilt lodged in his throat.

“Wait!” Thin fingers wrap around his wrist—all bone and cold skin—and Derek wrenches away. Stiles frowns, still shirtless, and crosses his arms over his chest.

“Don’t do that.”

Despite himself, Derek pauses in bewilderment. “Do what?”

Stiles’ hand flails out, gesturing at Derek, at something he can’t see. “That!” he exclaims. “The whole brooding and suffering in silence thing. I thought we were passed all this. Use your words, Derek.”

“Use my words?” Derek feels anger simmer beneath his skin, but not at Stiles. It’s mostly directed at himself, at the situation, at the universe that keeps fucking him over. “Ok how about these: Get. In. The. Car.”

“Hmm…I give that an overall 6.3. Props for the Eyebrows of Doom, but your voice lacks a certain, threatening edge.”

Derek bares his teeth and growls—honest to god growls, so loud he feels it in his bones—but Stiles doesn’t blink. He just cocks an eyebrow, unimpressed, and Derek can’t take this. He can’t take this joking, concerned boy that has the evidence of Derek’s shortcomings carved into his skin. Not even bothering to respond, Derek tries to muscle Stiles out of the way. He manages to get the door open a few inches before Stiles’ shoves his body against the metal, door slamming shut under his weight alone.

“Hey no! No, you don’t get to do this again,” he scowls. The expression is weird on his face, unnatural. Derek hasn’t seen it, directed at him at least, in years. “You don’t get to shut everyone out like before. What’s wrong?”

 _Everything,_ Derek wants to say. _Nothing has ever been right and it’s all my fault._

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says instead.

Stiles scoffs. “Right. Look, just because I can’t hear your heartbeat doesn’t mean I’m fucking stupid man. Seriously. What’s wrong?”

Derek wonders when he lost the ability to lie or when Stiles gained the ability to read him. He wonders which is worse.

“Nothing,” he grits out between clenched teeth. “Now will you just get in the car so we can leave?”

 _Before you freeze to death and it’s just more blood on my hands, just another grave I have to dig,_ he thinks but doesn’t say, doesn’t know **how** to say.

“No,” Stiles says stubbornly. He lifts his chin and widens his stance. “I’m not leaving until you talk because if you don’t talk now, you’ll disappear for _days_ into your loft, probably sitting in darkness, stewing in your manpain, and Isaac gets twitchy when that happens, which makes Scott irritable, and an irritable Scott is not a good day for Stiles and I didn’t come home for this whole break to be ruined okay? So you’re going to talk and you’re going to talk no—”  

“Why do you even come back?”

The words fall out of Derek’s mouth like stones. Birds explode out of the treetops above them like they’re startled, surprised, _confounded,_ and the two young men feel no different. Derek exhales softly, bewildered that his mouth has betrayed him, and Stiles…well Stiles _gapes._

“I…wow,” he blinks. “Did that really work? I didn’t think that would work. I was actually expecting you to kind of snap some more and then just shove me in the—” Surprisingly enough, Stiles manages to cut himself off. He shakes his head as if to shake his ADHD off or to rattle his thoughts into order. “Never mind. But…wait what?”

Derek _means_ to shrug it off, to say _nothing_ as usual, but when he opens his mouth, what comes out instead is, “Why? Why do you come back…here?” He gestures around them, to the woods, to the town, to **_himself._**

Stiles looks puzzled, and slightly concerned, as if Derek’s talking crazy. “Home?” he tries. “You’re asking me why I come home from school? That’s pretty simple, Derek.”

“You _know_ that’s not what I mean.”

“Actually, I don’t. You’re being incredibly vague. Try to be more specific. Use some adjectives, maybe a few appositives.”

The anger that Derek’s been feeling, the self-loathing, rockets to the surface and oozes out of his pore, bleeds off his tongue, and he can’t stop it, can’t stop, _can’t stop it._

Between one breath and the next, Derek finds himself in Stiles’ face, pinning him to the side of his car, eyes burning red without his permission. “Why are you **_here_** Stiles?” he says, and it comes out broken, confused, not pissed like he wanted. “Why are you always here? Why don’t you…stay away? You can get killed Stiles! Are you that fucking _stupid?_ You’re going to end up dead one day because _you won’t stay the fuck away!”_

His shout echoes out into the forest, startling more birds from their roosts. Stiles stares at him—straight at him, Derek is no longer taller and when did that happen?—and exhales shakily. From this distance, Derek can see the amber of his eyes, the whiskey color burning through him more than a shot of Jack Daniels ever could. Silence pervades longer than is comfortable, and Derek is just coming back to himself when Stiles finds his voice.

“That question is still pretty simple, dude.”

“God damn it Stiles, I—”

“We’re pack.”

The words suck the air right out of Derek’s lungs. He blinks, but Stiles doesn’t move, his face doesn’t change. He stares up at Derek, and his heartbeat is steady, his breathing even.

“Wh…what?” Derek breathes.

“We’re pack,” Stiles repeats, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. _The sky is blue. Winter is cold. We’re pack._ “That’s what you we do. We have pizza to celebrate golden times and when crazy wolves and even crazier people hit town well…” He shrugs. “We deal with it.”

Derek doesn’t respond. He _can’t._ Because he’s thought of Stiles as pack since Jennifer took the Sherriff, since the Alpha Pack began to be a threat if he’s being completely honest with himself. But it’s always just been something _he_ thought, _he_ believed. He never thought Stiles saw himself as such, not really, not to make it count. The fact that he does…the fact that he does…

Stiles clears his throat suddenly, and his heart stutters beneath his ribs. He laughs and it’s a nervous sound. “I mean…we…we are pack aren’t we?” he says, insecurity in his words, uncertainty in every inch of him. Derek blinks and takes a deep breath, looks at Stiles and really _sees._

Here is this little human boy. He’s scatter brained and a motor mouth. He can dig under anyone’s skin and make a _saint_ contemplate mass murder. He’s annoying and stubborn and…and he’s brave. Courageous to the point of stupidity and loyal to a goddamn fault. This little human boy of paper skin and glass bones, who has stuck around longer than he should have, who has bled for Derek and his own, who has been beaten down and down and _down again…_ but who always gets back up.

This boy…who knows loss just as much as Derek but does not let it define him.

Derek thinks about saying no, can see in Stiles’ eyes that he’s waiting for that answer. It would be better if Derek _did_ say no, if Derek pushed Stiles out of the pack, pushed him out of Beacon Hills, pushed him out of danger all together.

But he doesn’t.

Because Derek is not his mother and he is not Laura. He is not noble nor is he courageous. He’s a failure, though he tries his hardest, and above all else…he is very, very selfish. And very, very lonely.

So, instead of doing what is best for Stiles, Derek sighs and scrubs a hand through his hair, feels water slide down the back of his neck. Closing his eyes, he tips his head back and sags against the car, against Stiles, too tired to fight any longer. “Yeah, Stiles,” he mutters and it’s like a condemnation and an apology wrapped in an abject sense of relief. “We are.”

And because Stiles doesn’t know what’s good for him, because he can’t see how Derek is poison, he smiles and the fading moonlight plays in the cracks of his teeth. “Aww,” he croons, breath ghosting across Derek’s chin and neck. “You really do love me don’t ya Sourwolf?”

He throws his head back and laughs, clearly joking, but Derek finds himself staring at the line of his jaw, the curve of his throat. Derek finds himself thinking about what Stiles has said and what Stiles has done for him in the past three years. He thinks about Stiles running out into the woods to save him from these hunters; he thinks about Stiles treading water for two hours, arm tight around his chest and _not letting go_ ; he thinks about Stiles barging into his loft with Chinese take out and video games because it’s the anniversary of his family’s death and, while everyone else had made themselves scarce, Stiles was a breed unto himself. Derek thinks about how Stiles had become pack without meaning to, without trying, without Derek even **noticing** , and he thinks…

_Yeah. Maybe I do._


End file.
